Recently, in accordance with the expansion of broadcasting services having high definition (HD) resolution in the country and around the world, many users have been accustomed to a high resolution and definition picture, such that many organizations have attempted to develop the next-generation picture devices. In addition, as the interest in HDTV and ultra high definition (UHD) having a resolution four times higher than that of HDTV have increased, a compression technology for a higher-resolution and higher-definition picture has been demanded.
For the picture compression, an inter prediction technology of predicting pixel values included in a present picture from a picture before and/or after the present picture, an intra prediction technology of predicting pixel values included in a present picture using pixel information in the present picture, an entropy encoding technology of allocating a short code to symbols having a high appearance frequency and a long code to symbols having a low appearance frequency, or the like, may be used.
An example of the picture compression technology may include a technology providing a predetermined network bandwidth under a limited operation environment of hardware, without considering a flexible network environment. However, in order to compress picture data applied to the network environment in which the bandwidth is frequently changed, a new compression technology is required. To this end, a scalable video encoding/decoding method may be used.